ABSTRACT
VC was a retired chief engineer in large ships such as liners who became profoundly amnesic at the age of 67 following a tachyarrhythmia requiring cardioversion. His wife and his colleagues reported that pre-morbidly he used to have excellent memory and was able to function at a high level in his highly responsible job. VC had a remarkably extensive and ungraded retrograde amnesia which affected both personal and non-personal memories. He also showed a severe pervasive impairment of anterograde memory encompassing recognition and recall of verbal and non-verbal memoranda, with one notable exception. Standard clinical memory tests revealed the presence of a severe anterograde memory impairment affecting both recognition and recall, which remained static over the seven-year testing period. Converging evidence from a variety of different neuroimaging methods confirmed selective damage to the hippocampi. Structural MRI findings consistently found selective bilateral hippocampal damage.
